March 17, 2014

"They Tore Down Paradise To Put Up A Parking Lot"

Sir Thomas Browne (19 October 1605 – 19 October 1682) was an English polymath and author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including science and medicine, religion and the esoteric.

Browne is widely considered one of the most original writers in the English language. The freshness and ingenuity of his mind invested everything he touched with interest; while on more important subjects his style, if frequently rugged and pedantic, often rises to the highest pitch of stately eloquence. His paradoxical place in the history of ideas, as both a promoter of the new inductive science, as an adherent of ancient esoteric learning as well as a devout Christian have greatly contributed to his ambiguity in the history of ideas. For these reasons, the literary critic Robert Sencourt succinctly assessed him as "an instance of scientific reason lit up by mysticism in the Church of England."

Browne knew that, as a medical doctor, he stood half-convinced of
infidelity in many people's eyes, and his title, A Doctor's Religion,
was one some would see as a paradox. Given his glory in paradoxes, the
joke implied in writing a book with such a title, and making it an
intellectual's expression of simple and, for the most part,
uncomplicated faith in Protestant Christianity, was not lost on him.
This is not a humorous book but it is, in a far deeper sense, a good
humoured one, and its lively thinking – and playing with paradoxes – is
an expression both of Browne's personality and of what he believed truth
to be.